The dental surgery environment has considerably changed in the last few years. In order to provide patients with increasingly complete services in comforting and modern surroundings, practitioners invest in more and more sophisticated equipment. Moreover, faced with the endlessly increasing diversity of clinical treatments (restoration, endodontics, prophylaxis, orthodontics, implants, etc.) offered by practitioners, the necessary number of instruments has considerably increased.
However, the work space of the practitioner is limited. All the instruments necessary for the treatment must be grouped around the patient seated in the chair and they must remain within the practitioner's reach. Further, the instruments must be able to be changed quickly during treatment and between two successive patients. Likewise, the instruments must be able to be used simply and in conditions of impeccable hygiene to reduce as far as possible any risk of error in handling or of contamination.
To satisfy these new requirements, each medical equipment manufacturer provides its own response attempting to distinguish itself from the competitors. To achieve this, manufacturers create work environments which differ from those of competitors as regards both hardware and software. Manufacturers will, for example, offer a user interface with a new graphical presentation, a touch screen or the possibility of choosing the language of use.
Faced with such an abundance of supply, practitioners are often unable to become sufficiently familiar with the work environment peculiar to each manufacturer to be able to use the numerous pieces of equipment available in an intuitive manner, which may lead to risks both for practitioners and their patients.
To overcome these problems, the tendency seen for several years has been to group together the largest possible number of instruments within the same power and control unit (commonly called a “unit”) so that the user interface of the unit can be used to control all of the instruments. However, the control means of the unit does not always have the flexibility necessary for all the functions of the instruments to be used. Moreover, practitioners often wish to fit additional instruments to their unit sometimes long after the unit has been purchased. In this case too, the facility of use and versatility of the user interface fitted to the unit are key factors in the successful and risk-free integration of new instruments in the unit.
In some cases, however, it is not possible to modernise the unit and the practitioner has to purchase table top equipment in addition to the instruments integrated in the dental unit. The number of user interfaces that the practitioner has to manage therefore has a tendency to increase, which may constitute a risk for the practitioner or the patient, or at least a lack of efficiency.
Further, nowadays an increasing number of dental clinics are being set up in which several practitioners work in a team and combine their area of clinical specializations in order to offer a complete service to patients. These dental clinics also allow practitioners to share both working expenses (personal assistant, rent, etc.) and investment costs.
However, although equipment is shared, each practitioner wishes to continue with the same work habits. Thus, there is a requirement for versatile work tools which can be used in an extremely flexible way by several people. The equipment, in particular dental units and table top equipment, must therefore be able to be adapted to the requirements of each user.